Hardware

Review: HPE SimpliVity 380 Gen10 Node Can Be an Essential Part of Federal Continuity Plans

This rack-mountable unit is a one-stop solution for creating backups in virtual environments or on-premises infrastructure.

John Breeden II

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John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer and public speaker with 20 years of experience covering technology.

With software-defined networking, cloud, virtualized workloads and hyperconverged infrastructure, government agencies have more choices when building out networks and data centers. But that freedom can lead to complexity that wasn’t an issue when the computing environment lived on physical servers.

This can affect core government principles, such as having solid continuity of operations (COOP) plans in place so that work can continue in an emergency. COOP plans exist for physical infrastructure, but what happens to virtual workloads if the cloud or virtual server suddenly becomes unavailable?

Increasingly, agencies are turning back to the physical world to back up the virtual one. The HPE SimpliVity 380 Gen10 node can play a part.

Designed as a fully modular unit with both swappable and hot-swappable parts, it’s a powerful bit of physical infrastructure that can be used as part of a COOP initiative or nearly anything else.

When deployed as a backup device, it allows for one-touch restoration of most virtual environments. The unit takes up two units of space in a standard server rack and is designed so users can pack it full of wildly different configurations based on their needs. This enables agencies to start small and then expand capabilities.

Nodes Scale By Orders of Magnitude

Each SimpliVity 380 Gen10 node can support up to two processors, each with between eight and 28 cores. Other components can also be added. For example, at the low end, you can run the node with just 144 gigabytes of memory, enough to support backup operations for virtualized services like Microsoft Office applications for medium-sized workgroups.

But it can also scale up to 3,072GB of RAM, more in the realm of something a data center might employ to support multiple virtualized workloads. That vast scalability adds flexibility.

In addition to the wide range of scalability, the HPE infrastructure means multiple nodes can work together. A single unit can provide backup for a branch office’s operations, or many units may provide similar services for a headquarters building.

All that makes the HPE SimpliVity 380 Gen10 node a great choice to tame the complexity that comes with a nearly unlimited virtual and cloud-based infrastructure.

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Simple Interface Leads to Flexible Configuration

Although you can technically configure HPE SimpliVity 380 Gen10 nodes into anything you want, they are mostly designed for backup duties, especially for virtual workloads that may not have any other form of definite backup protection.

To help make their nodes even more efficient in that role, HPE has made all SimpliVity units compatible with its StoreOnce platform. StoreOnce is incredibly simple to use, with an easy-to-configure graphical interface as well as lots of automated processes.

The main advantage to StoreOnce, beyond its simple interface, is that it enables all data being stored though it to be deduplicated, compressed and optimized. And all that backup data is fully independent from its source, so even if the source node or virtual server is destroyed, the data can be fully re-created and restored. Deduplication in conjunction with compression and optimization is highly efficient.

GET THE ANSWERS: Learn how to add Disaster Recovery as a Service solutions to your COOP plans.

The premise behind this technology is that, for example, a typical government agency might store information on forms. A lot of the information on those forms is identical — the agency logo, address and various input fields are the same, only the data within the fields are different.

Deduplication allows for the backup device to store a single copy of all the duplicate data instead of multiple copies, which can really reduce how much space is needed for backups, especially over time.

As an example, if you have 300 terabytes of typical office type data, you can probably compress it down to less than 10TB of actual space on the node. Some things, like videos, don’t compress very well, but most data types squish down to almost nothing.

Using the StoreOnce technology from HP could extend the life of a backup node and keep it from running out of space for a very long time.

SPECIFICATIONS

SUPPORTED MEMORY: 144GB up to 3,072GB
MAXIMUM PROCESSORS: Two Intel Xeon Scalable processors
MAXIMUM RAM: 1.5TB
SUPPORTED STORAGE: 5 960G SSDs up to 12 3.84 SSDs
DIMENSIONS: 17.5x26.7x3.4 inches
RACK SIZE: Two units

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